July 25, 2011

It’s been an insane month. Just wanted to take a moment to let my friends, colleagues and my loyal readers know that my wife popped out our first child the other day. July 12th at 2:10 am Ms. Georgia Laine Pawliuk-Maidlow was born and let me tell you she is full of awesome! Both Mom and Babby are doing great. Both Mom and Dad are both pretty tired =) Here is a picture for your viewing enjoyment =P

May 12, 2011

Today I received an unsolicited phone call from a helpful Indian fellow named Karesh, sadly his number was blocked so I cannot share that with you =). He informed me that there were "deadly junk files” on my computer, that were much worse than virii and trojans. He really cared about the health of my PC. He asked me to start the event viewer and showed me all the errors that were on my computer. It was terrifying.

Finally, he informed me that given the age of my PC we needed to “register my license with Microsoft to receive ongoing security assistance from Microsoft Certified Technicians”. He told me that “Microsoft provides two kinds of secure warranty. hardware and software! “ I needed to reactivate this protection…For the low low price of 109$ / year or 388 for 4 years I could get my computer protected from junk files, virii, trojans, and terrorists.

Next step was a LogmeInRescue session. At this time, I told my helpful friend Karesh that my PC had blue screened! Oh no! This bought me a little time to fire up a test virtual machine and Camtasia :). Turns out now a Mr. Kevin Andersen would be helping me, with a trial LogMeIn account :) I wonder if they noticed that my Windows Vista had now all of a sudden become Windows XP? hmmm doesn’t look like it.

This is where it got a little scary. Well not scary for you or I, but for your grandmother or other computer illiterate person. They started digging trough Windows for negative looking things. First they started the Windows certificate store and they highlight a number of revoked by Microsoft. They were even so kind as to highlight these problems!

At this point they brought me to the Quick Resolve website (quickresolve.net) where they were ready to help me enter all my information to pay the fee. At this point, I asked to get four years of coverage. Karesh became quite excited! First I needed to see the “Junk Files” on my PC. Mr. Kevin Andersen started the “Junk Files Viewer” (which you may know as the event viewer). He applied some tricky filters and then BAM. Errors and warnings. Now your grandmother is probably scrambling to find her credit card…

I let Karesh talk for a bit more, ready to stop my VM – finally I had another “Blue Screen” and hung up. Oops ,look I restored a snapshot… Unfortunately the joke is on me..they’ve been calling back over and over and over. <sigh>

At first, I went along for the ride because I figured it might be fun. Soon I started to realize that this will be very convincing to a lot of people, and I started to think that maybe I should write this up in hopes of letting the geeky masses know. So please let the people in your lives who could benefit by knowing about this type of scam know that no one will ever call you at home out of the blue to help you remove junk files…

Text messaging pricing has always annoyed me. Given the recent craziness around the CRTC and usage based billing I wondered how the proposed rates of UBB stacked up against what we’re charged for text messages. Here is some figuring based on some maths I pilfered and simplified from skootles on reddit.

February 16, 2011

I’m in love with SmartInk… I’m using it for just about everything I write on paper. Initially I started laying down ink purely as a testing exercise for SmartInk – but now I’m finding more and more uses for the pages that are getting saved up into the cloud.

One thing that I decided would help me would be to create a pre-printed notepad so I was not having to constantly print out new pages to write on. I decided to build out a nice little Microsoft Word “template” that could be printed off en-mass in using SmartInk. And well, sharing is caring. So here it is!

Creating this template was pretty simple. I fired up word and started a new blank. I added a stock header and footer. Slapped in the SmartInk logo and typed in a title. Added a footer and that was it. All you SmartInk users may to download this template and modify it to have your own corporate logo or company name – feel free to do so. You could even go so far as to hire a designer or work with your corporate marketing department to build you out a custom design. If your organization has an existing corporate letterhead template you can simply load this up in word and print off a blank page using the SmartInk print driver.

Last step is to bind the pages. You can go as simply or as crazy as you like! The easiest option here would be to use a 3 ring binder and simply use the standard hole punch. Optionally you could also invest in a coil binding machine or some binding glue (rubber cement). More details on DIY notepads here. One last thing to look into, though this might be the most expensive would be to have a printing company bind the pages for you. You could get some seriously cool notepads done with this method – hard cover, embossed corporate logos, etc. Just remember though that the printing needs to be done on using the SmartInk printing driver.

I’ve attached a zip file to this post that contains a Microsoft Word docx file that can simply be printed out using the SmartInk printer driver.

If you have any suggestions on how to make this template better I’d love to hear from you. Please comment here, or head over to the ChasmTech support forum and post a topic there It’s funny – I’ve been using Microsoft word forever – at least since Office 95 – but I’ve barely scratched the surface of its functionality =)

February 3, 2011

I’ve been following this CRTC decision for quite some time. Recently the petition against UBB hit 400K signatures – and turned the head of even the Canadian ruler. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not against companies making a profit - but come on. Lowering bandwidth caps and charging between 1 and 15 dollars per gigabyte is gouging.

Keep pushing the CRTC to stop the meter on Internet use. If 400,000 could turn their heads, then 1,000,000 ought to bowl them over.